In Search of a Past
The Manor House, Amnersfield, 1933-1945
Format:Hardback
Publisher:Verso Books
Published:31st Aug '10
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"A remarkably honest and revealing study." -John Fowles
Ronald Fraser is an internationally renowned chronicler of other people's experience. Born in Hamburg in 1930, he settled in the Home Counties at three years of age with his wealthy American mother and Scots father to enter the life of the energetically idle rich. This title presents an account of his own origins.Ronald Fraser, the internationally renowned oral historian, turns his attention to his own origins in this remarkable memoir. In Search of a Past gathers the recollections of the servants who worked at the manor house outside London where Fraser grew up. It was the place where his parents-one American, the other Scottish-learned to embrace the lifestyle of the idle local gentry. Fraser paints a vivid picture of a vanished interwar world. Sensitively recorded, the words of his family's former employees capture the texture of English "county" life as seen from below, woven into a background of their personal lives, their work and the social antagonisms they experienced.
Beneath their stories, however, the author glimpses another unspoken narrative-that of his own childhood. He submits to a course of psychoanalysis and delves into a past riven by confusing emotions and conflicting class allegiances. The result is an innovative, honest, and beautifully written account of the search for lost time, one that defies literary categorization.
This book makes an important breach in the walls of memory and penetrates its frozen silences. -- Raphael Samuel
ISBN: 9781844675975
Dimensions: 216mm x 147mm x 21mm
Weight: 393g
216 pages
2nd edition